8 Replies - 13229 Views - Last Post: 17 February 2012 - 06:15 AM

Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 10 February 2012 - 10:50 PM

One of my friends brought this article to my attention. The title is: Is SEO Really Bad for the Internet? And what about Google? Do you all think tying moneymaking to search engine results is a business model that will (continue to) serve Google well long-term?

Google employee Jon Rockway made this point, which I thought was interesting:

Quote

Of course there are bad approaches to SEO. However, this attitude that SEO=SPAM should stop. Because the biggest violators are Google themselves. It takes content from third party sites and slowly wraps it up with ads. Google gets into short term partnerships with businesses with an edge, learn their processes, use those to build up their own offering, and then terminate those relationships.

Up to a few years ago, Google used to use Yell to supply local content. Now, itís overtaken by Google Local. For years Google has been taking money from credit card companies and comparison sites alike. Now, it has launched its own version, which it uses Adwords to push.

SEO isn't an area I have much experience in, personally. What are everyone's thoughts on this?

Replies To: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Re: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 11 February 2012 - 03:39 PM

I assume that SEO is Search Engine Optimization. However I agree that it is bad for the internet as numerous times I search for information and the responses I get back is from someplace wanting to sell me something. I would roughly estimate that 60% of the responses fell into this category. The internet was originally meant for the exchange of information. However it is nice that you can go online to find something that isn't available locally for sale. There was a very brief time that you could block websites that continually hijacked your searches to try to sell you something. I don't remember if it was yahoo or Google. The search engine caved in to the advertisers and took that function away. Probably the best solution would be to allow a filter as to whether we wanted to buy something or not. This would help greatly to weed out the irrelevant responses and make the searches more effective.

Re: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 11 February 2012 - 03:48 PM

I am heavily active in the anti forum spam area. I have many, trap only forums, mx honeypots, and various other things to catch idiots. Why do the idiots spam boards? SEO. Get their clients links on as many places as possible and a search engine will crawl the forum and gobble up the urls in posts.

SEO is a valid topic/market, but it has gone a bit too far. You sell shoes, you hire a company you think is legit to submit to search engines, well, they just pop your url into a program that spams boards unrelated to your product and when someone searches they will get unrelated stuff back.

Re: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 14 February 2012 - 10:29 AM

With all things in our society there are the good and the bad. Good SEO is designed to increase the relevance of the results that a user is querying providing them with the best user experience. Bad SEO (ie. spam) does exactly what we're all complaining about here, puts crap in the way of the relevant stuff.

What we are talking about here are two separate entities - SEO and Google AdWords. From what I understand, Google AdWords is getting better at determining what ads are actually relevant and apply a "quality score" to each ad. The less relevant an ad is, the more the company has to pay for it to place and the lower in the list it appears. Granted, with enough money these ads will still place high, but never above the organic search results.

SEO practices can manipulate the placement of ads, but only to a point. If the ad itself has little to do with the search query, it loses points on it's "quality score" and pushes the ad lower. If the landing page of the ad has little to do with the search query or the text used in the ad it loses more points. If the links leading off that landing page are completely irrelevant that too lowers the quality score.

As you can see, Google is taking steps to reduce poor ad placement to increase positive user experience. Good SEO can also be used to increase positive results and bad SEO practices need to continue to be penalized.

Re: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 15 February 2012 - 01:33 PM

As some have pointed out it depends on what you mean by SEO. I work as a web developer and I'm constantly asked this question, "Do you offer SEO services?". "No", is my usual reply after I ask them to clarify what they mean.

Most folks reply that SEO is getting their page/website ranked "number one" in Google. They'll point out this company or that company that says they can do it for $xx.xx dollars a month. SEO has become synonymous with the "snake-oil" salesmen of the late 19th and early 20th centuries mainly because they don't understand how Google's algorithm actually works and how they, Google, continually work to improve it. I believe even DreamInCode's ranking dropped when Google changed the algorithm... I think it was in the D.I.C. news letter or a blog post...

There are very simple basics to improving your sites page rank. Content Content Content.
1. Have relevant content on the subject matter (keywords) you wish to target. Having a domain name that fits your keywords does help too, but it's not essential.
2. Follow best practices for coding your HTML, heading tags, no simple "read more" links, meta descriptions and keywords that actually match your pages content (somewhat less relevant as Google tends to ignore them because of keyword spamming but this could change) etc...
3. Update your content/site regularly. If you think you're going to publish a five to ten page website, never update the content and rise to the top of Google search for "home care" well good luck to you.
4. To a lesser extent engage your community, setup a Facebook page, Twitter account, blog. If you have multiple brands within the same company and you can "cross pollinate" do so, but your links have to be relevant.

There are no tricks, no silver bullets. It might work, (Black hat & grey hat techniques), short term but long term all you will have done is hurt your site and lose money.

I don't like the change Google made for sponsored Ads sometimes being at the top of a search page but you can opt-out.

Re: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 15 February 2012 - 06:49 PM

SEO is being gradually eliminated by Google anyway. Each month, new changes to the Google webpage classification algorithm makes it more and more difficult to artificially inflate a site's positioning beyond its real merit. In the future, we won't have SEO. We will just have content, and the quality of the content will determine the reputation in the search results. Think about it. Google's mission is to make reputable content more relevant to the user. A SEO company's mission is to improve the rankings of a client's website by increasing its reputation within search engines, above other (possibly more relevant) content. It is a false industry. If we are talking about paid search, that is something different, and will still exist. If we are talking about information architecture and best practice web development in making content indexable and available, that is something different too, and will still exist. But 'SEO' in the future will boil down to 'write great content'. That will be it.

Re: Is SEO Bad for the Internet?

Posted 17 February 2012 - 06:15 AM

I thought i had made a post here a few says ago but apparently not. also excuse my bad grammar my phone doesn't let me see what im typing... anyway

i think the term SEO has been misused a lot. maybe im being a purist here but I've always thought that SEO meant what it was which is optimizing your site to getting as much search listings/rankings as it possibly can. In other words if you have a great functionality for your site with lots of interesting content but umoptimised (bad keywords, no links, few pages) then it won't be getting the traffic it deserve and would have to rely on word of mouth or Google adwords etc.

There seems to be a consensus among webmasters that if a site is SEO'd enough, regardless odd its content quality or appeal, then it can draw lots of traffic. this was coupeled with hype of Google pagerank which made people acquire high pagerank backlinks as much as possible instead of improving their site content and raising money for adverts.it makes me think that it's wonderful for Google to get rid of that pagerank thing altogether; people stop benchmarking by an arbitrary number and use real numbers such as volume of registered users, monthly unpaid traffic, and many others. with regards to the backlink malarchy, i am also curious to know if Google valuesb acklinks from your own pages to your index page as much as or more than other irrelevant website linkage.